There will be a beta before release. There is no set date yet, but most likely in the spring.

The beta will most likely focus on zones that have changed since Warcraft III in WoW, such as the Culling of Stratholme.

Changes and Additions

Dalaran and other iconic places will look more like they do in WoW.

There are no plans for new campaigns that were not in the original game.

All in game cutscenes are being completely redone and use a new camera system for the editor.

The redone cutscenes will focus in on characters as they talk instead of having to have pop up dialogue.

Cinematics other than the one seen at Blizzcon will be cleaned up at a higher resolution, but not 100% redone.

The team thought it was important not to change the game engine and this is what caused them to create a render engine on top of the existing game for Reforged.

Story

The team thought it was important to incorporate a way for people who play WoW to be invited to come see the origins stories for the game.

The story will be fundamentally the same, but the team wants to also develop characters that were secondary such as Sylvanas and Jaina.

Christie Golden has come in to help clean up the dialogue.

Some of the dialogue in the original game was meant as placeholder but was sent to be voice acted.

There were so many ideas that didn't quite make the original game and this is an opportunity to develop them.

Community and Map Editor

The map editor will incorporate Lua support and larger maps.

Some of the people working on Reforged were hired out of the Warcraft III community.

The art tools should be available sometime before release for map creators along with guides on how to use them.

Warcraft III was selected to be reforged first over the other two because of the community demand.

There are no official Esports additions planned right now.

The team is focused on making sure the UI is helpful for watching the game, however.

Development

The game has been in development for about two years.

Starcraft: Remastered helped the team develop and grow for this project.

Animation timing was the biggest restriction for the team because while the models are updated, they can't change the timing for the animations.

Each unit, such as murlocs, will look slightly different.

There are no plans for a physical copy of the Spoils of War addition at this time.

Balance Changes

Balanced is based off of community feedback.

The team wants all heroes and units to be balanced better.

Small map advantages are being addressed as well.

Audio and Dialogue

All dialogue is being rerecorded and utilizing the voice actors from WoW.

There will be 13 different languages available.

Custom Games

There will be better filtering for custom games.

The 12 unit selection cap will not be removed.

Custom games are utilizing cloud service.

Forbes' How Women Came to Rule the World of Warcraft Interview
Forbes recently posted an article interviewing Lydia Bottegoni, the senior vice president of story and franchise for Blizzard Entertainment, and Terran Gregory, the in-game cinematic project director, on the recent rise of female characters in World of Warcraft.

This rise in female characters was not done on purpose. It happened organically as the story progressed and wasn't a marketing angle.

Unfair would not be a word used to describe the fact that two powerful male characters are going to oppose Sylvanas as she is clearly a force to be reckoned with.

Realizing that all three Warbringers are woman was hindsight, it wasn't a goal.

The story up to Warlords of Draenor was very much Orc vs Human. Now that this has died down, it has paved the way for new characters and stories to develop.

The team realized that a lot of the prominent characters in the story being told right now are female, but only saw it as an observation and not something that they need to change as they just want to tell these great stories.

The fact that all three Warbringers have complex, deep stories makes them work so well.

Terran was excited to work with Yrel in cutscenes during Warlords of Draenor because she was pitched as being a Draenei Joan of Arc.

The team hopes fans notice that some of the recent cinematics have been more quiet and character driven over huge action scenes.

The team doesn't necessarily believe that they have to balance the story about how many main characters are of each gender. They just want to tell interesting stories that players care about.

Not all characters resemble their motion capture counterparts, but if it works (such as with Anduin) they will utilize it.

While they did use some motion capture design, it was still mostly referential. The performances that we see from Saurfang or Sylvanas or Anduin are still largely hand keyed and driven by our animation artists.

The team utilized a lot of real-time cutscenes in BfA and hope to develop them more in the future.

When a cinematic fires in-game, by and large their function is to match the game’s art style.

There are no plans for a fully three dimensional cutscene yet, but the team would be excited to try one!

Legendary Pictures still has involvement in licensing rights for the stereoscopic view of Stormwind that they used to promote the movie.

Dark Legacy Comics #656 - No Day but TuesdayDLC #656 has been released!